Monday, November 3, 2008

The Nutopia Forum cordially invites you to our one-night-only inaugural group exhibition hosted by the fine folks at K & M Studios this thursday night. The ShowNight will be the first time that we open our doors to the public & will feature 18 participating photographers with prints ranging in size & matter.

We ask only of you to bring friends, countrymen, good spirits & as always a healthy supply of booze.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

You may have notice a rather (lengthy) long pause in recent (any) activity on the blog, were still here chopping up letters, playing with pictures making a magazine but we have, how do we put it, reprioritized are objectives.

There was a time when this little blog was running at (somewhat) full speed and we worked hard to find and bring you new and exciting bits of joy from the vast world at large. However summer came strolling along whilst we got submerged with a tsunami of work at the studio, enjoyed the beautiful summer weather and did some traveling and the blog suffered (massively).

None the less after a breathe of fresh air and some contemplating we looked around and saw the many other bloggers who are doing quite a dandy job keeping the photoworld up to date and informed. From this we have made the decision to focus more on another one of our endeavors, the magazine in particular the print.

We have been working hard gathering and laying out what was once digital and putting it into a more familiar format of a book with pages and glue. We are working a bit backwards as we more forward (online) and need the help of you all getting us your content just to move in any direction.

With that we would like to present Nutopia Magazine Issue 8 in it's printed form. We are a bit unorthodox with the order, first number one, now number eight but it keeps things interesting. Its anyone's guess which one will come out the presses next.

So next time you are around the neighborhood stop by and check out one of these little beauties and next forum night we should have a few more to pass around.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Perhaps the most important & influential music and culture magazine of the entire 90's was a bold graphic statement published by Marvin Scott Jarrett & directed by David Carson, it was called Ray Gun. Many of you will be familiar with Jarrett as he is the co-founder of Nylon magazine however the true genius, or sheer accident of the magazine falls upon Carson's three monumental years there. It remains pointless to argue if he knew what he was doing the whole time or as he admits "flat-out mistakes" were made in the proofing stages, regardless it changed things, drastically.

The first three years {circa 1992-95} saw Carson break every imaginable rule in the book and literally set the style and feel for the next five years or seven following art directors. One of the better tales of Ray Gun is Carson's boredom & blatant disgust towards a rather bland interview with Brian Ferry that he decided read better in Zap Dingbat. For those unfamiliar with Zap Dingbat, it's the one at the bottom of your font list and consists of only symbols.

The brilliance behind Carson's design first lies in his naivety towards the medium followed by his passion & emotional attachment towards his work. He admits, in reference to breaking the rules, that he knew nothing of them as he was self taught; it was only later someone explained the word "modernists" to him. In regards to his passion & emotional involvement to his work, self indulgence comes to mind at first yet a second look provides the answer. His type treatment & layouts ooze feelings and thus create an automatic response, sometimes good & sometimes bad, you in a sense are visually reading the article before you even read the first word. When its good, it's bloody great but when it goes astray, well it is what it is, a giant experiment.

So, if you bothered to read this far we happen upon a small collection of post-carson Ray Gun issues that convey the spirt & awesomeness that Carson started. Unfortunately this collection {1996/7/8} went for around a hundred or so dollars on eBay so the chances of getting the early stuff (Carson Era) are slim. However enjoy the period dubbed "grunge type" and a few of our favorite pages below:

Cheers to Jeff for letting us borrow these period pieces, hopefully there is something for everyone in there.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

So we once had this brilliant idea to go around to some of favorite little independent shoppes in the area and do a small feature on them. Of course very near the top of our list was the wonderful Dashwood Books. Well to our pleasant surprise someone beat us to it and for that matter did a fantastic job to boot.

For those not familiar with Uniqlo, imagine American Apparel but not trying so hard to be cool. One thing we very much admire about them is their bi-seasonal magazine known as Paper. It is a very controlled experiment seeing that they are in their infancy (this is issue No. 4) but they have thrown all the rules out the window and always present something new. We highly recommend you swinging by their flagship store in soho to pick up a free copy and hey you may even find some new threads along the way.

Spot on Uniqlo for the fine publication & to David Strettel for Dashwood.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Hey y'all,We wanted to let you know about a few amazing upcoming openings/evenings in lower manhattan area, get your iPhones out and take down some dates because these range from the fanciful, to the obscure to the stupendous and then some. =============================================

First on thursday night {the 29th} we jet down to ludlow st. for our mate Fanny Bostrom's first solo show, Picnic. The show will be at The 31Grand Gallery, at 143 Ludlow, confusion no? the reception is from 7-9. We have been fortunate to see some of this brilliant work and highly recommend a viewing.

Next up our new favorite gallery hidden at the end of Canal St, Pablo's Birthday is opening their newest offering, Winston Roeth on Saturday night {the 24th}. We were lucky enough to find this amazing gem somewhere near Canal St. & the Westside Highway and can't get enough of it. We don't know much about Roeth other than he has a very good understanding of color but we do know there will a plethora of good people throughout. One of which is Jimi, whom we had a great chat with & hope to feature in Nutopia Magazinevery soon.

And last but not least, Whoa this looks totally rad. Creative Time & David Byrne present Playing the Building at the old Battery Maritime Building. The gist of this gargantuan project is this, a 9,000 sq foot open space with a retrofitted organ that is attached to various structural pieces (i.e. metal beams, plumbing, conduits & pipes) hence the title of the piece. The opening is next friday {the 30th} and looks to be a mad house but atleast there will be music, or maybe sound.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

As the old sang goes a picture is worth a thousand words, we already disproved that but in any case this picture is worth at least a ten minute story by the only man who could tell it, Platon. The World Press Photo contest has put together quite a nice collection and very nicely designed, we may add presentation of select images with accompanying photographer turned storyteller.

While we have enjoyed many of the stories from the amazing photographers who contributed there is something truly gripping about hearing the harrowing tale from deep in the dacha. It appears we are not alone as well, others are too impressed with Platons public speaking, maybe there is a retirement plan somewhere in there.

Anyhow fair play to both Platon for the brilliant story and image & to World Press for putting this all together, keep rocking it.

A bit of extra random knowledge for y'all, anyone who occupies a dacha is for the time being called a dachnik. Use that information as you please.

Cheers to Alec of Picturehouse for reminding us about this fine event.

And while we are spreading the internal love that is Nutopia we wanted to also let you know, Mr. Andreas Laszo Konrath will be presenting/(possibly) speaking about his work on wednesday night at the SoHo Photo Gallery, busy boy he is. He insists they just found him out of the blue and requested his presence but we think their is a bit of foul play here, possible payoff?

Who knows, but jokes aside this should be an interesting evening as this group has a bit of age on Nutopia but seems to be interested in similar ideas. In addition we will be featuring some of the work from the contributing photographers of this event in future issues of Nutopia Magazine. For those interested the details are below.{a side note, they are not affiliated with SoHo Photo, if you google that and get misinformed and thus lost, like we did}

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